Saudi Women Drive for More Rights

Saudi women drivers are showing up on the streets of the kingdom again in a renewed right-to-drive campaign, challenging what may be the last, de-facto ban on female drivers in the world after the government and religious conservatives in Saudi Arabia crushed at least two other such movements.

The revived right-to-drive campaign is scheduled to hit a peak on Oct. 26, when Saudi women taking part say they will take the steering wheel that day to go about their normal errands, and encourage other women who choose to do the same.

oct26driving.org

A petition on www.oct26driving.org supporting the drive

Already, ahead of Oct. 26, a handful of Saudi women are beginning to post videos of themselves driving – in the coastal city of Jeddah, in the Eastern Province, in the capital of Riyadh, even in the Qassim city of Bureidah, considered the kingdom’s most religiously conservative city.

Their black-sleeved arms gripping the steering wheel, their eyes flicking behind face veils back and forth between the road and rear-view mirrors, the ordinariness of their actions bely the daring of it.

The hope is that the kingdom and its people have moved forward since 1990 and 2011, two of the last times Saudi women made a point of driving to challenge the ban, says Eman al Nafjan, a lecturer at a Riyadh university, a writer, and a supporter of the campaign.

“People understand how large of an effect it has, with the economy the way it is now,” Ms. Nafjan says. Owing to the necessity of women hiring drivers or relying on male relatives to get around currently, “You can’t get from “A” to “B” unless you pay a toll for being a woman. It’s such an obstacle.”

Saudi Arabia, which follows a stringent Wahhabi code of Islam, does not formally outlaw women driving, but refuses to give women driver’s licenses. In 1990, women who drove in a mass challenge of the ban were called prostitutes in mosque sermons, and many of the protesters and their families suffered career setbacks in retaliation.

In 2011, Manal al Sharif, a leader of a renewed women’s driving campaign during the Arab Spring revolutions elsewhere, was jailed for several days for driving. A judge ordered flogging for another women who drove then, although the sentence was never carried out.

Some veterans of the 1990 and 2011 demonstrations say they will be on the roads again on Oct. 26.

The drive received an unintended boost in international attention early this month, when a Saudi cleric, Sheik Saleh bin Saad al Luhaydan, told Saudi news website http://sabq.org/ that driving, for women, “automatically affects ovaries and rolls up the pelvis. This is why we find, for women who continuously drive cars, their children are born with clinical disorders.”

The sheik’s pronouncement drew international coverage on blogs and news sites, under headlines such as “Driving Miss Ovary.”

Ms. Nafjan says no major Saudi cleric, however, has spoken out so far against the renewed campaign.

On Saturday, she rode with a female driver on an errand to a Riyadh appliance store, she says, getting a few stares but no trouble.

“Drive and errand done,” Ms. Nafjan tweeted after. “Bottom line: other drivers, police, people on the street couldn’t care less when they see a woman driving.”

Saudi Arabia is an absolute monarchy, where change comes from the top – the king. The kingdom forbids street protests, and most of the kingdom’s more outspoken activists since 2011 have been jailed, charged or made to sign pledges renouncing activism, according to the activists and Human Rights Watch.

To minimize the chances of a clampdown by the government, some of the women drivers are avoiding using the word “protest”. And women are driving singly as in the 2011 campaign, rather than in groups as they did in 1990.

Saudi King Abdullah bin Abdulaziz al Saud since 2011 has decreed some improvements in women’s rights since 2011. Women are now allowed to work in some retail jobs – something previously banned under religious prohibitions on men and women mingling in public. The king this year newly appointed the first 30 women to the Shoura Council, an advisory panel that is the kingdom’s closest semblance to a parliament. And the king has pledged women will be allowed to run in municipal elections set for 2015.

Three female members of the Shoura Council filed a recommendation this week asking the council to declare that driving by women is in accord with Islamic law.

With almost no public polling within the kingdom, it is impossible to gauge how most Saudis feel about the driving ban. Some Saudi women, stopped randomly in shopping malls and asked, said they opposed women driving, or believed the right time for it was still years away.

The unemployment rate for Saudi women, at about 36% according to the most recent labor ministry statistics cited in local newspapers, is six times that of Saudi men.

Saudi Arabia averages the lowest wages of the six countries in the Gulf Cooperation Council bloc, and Saudi women say they often pay the majority of their wages to drivers to take them to and from work. Only 10% of Saudi women take part in the labor market, despite high education levels, according to the labor ministry.

Asked if she feared the kind of repercussions leveled against participants in the earlier drives, Ms. Nafjan says, “What are we supposed to do? Are we supposed to be quiet? It’s just women driving. They’re going to take me to prison?”